Immortality defies the gods.

Last City Of Man stood in bleak sandblown towers before the Mad Swordsman in its tattered rags. The towering tarnished machine limped forward, dragging its sword-arm with its remaining limb. The brown robes covering the giant whipped in fluttering tatters and its hood shaded the cracked black orb that was its face.

"All dead. The enemy follows, as I bring the message of doom." Mad Swordsman laughed to itself as it went.

In the city it went, through the opening gates. There in the center of the calming wind storm stood Law Givers. These men and women were paid by tax revenue to read the laws written on the pillar in the center of the city. Each faced a different direction, loudly reciting Law.

The city was divided into districts, each within another, with an avenue that bisected the city in one direction, while the river it commanded bisected it in the other direction. At its heart stood the stronghold of its king. He was the only man in the city that was fertile. All the other men were castrated during childhood and partnered to a girl, betrothed. Yet when they were married, it was the king that took the bride on a honeymoon.

"It isn't madness? Would I recognize madness?" Mad Swordsman listened as the law was described. It decided that the laws of this final city were insane laws. All the taxes and mutilations. Every crime was punished the same way: by cutting off the offending body part. Sometimes just having that body part was a crime, apparently.

"What are you doing here, giant?" King Gamma asked. He had with him his army. Some had spears or clubs, others had bows and bronze axes, still a few had rusted assault rifles swathed in leather or painted rocket launchers decorated in fetishes. Their armor was similarly arranged from grass shields, sports padding or chainmail to patched flak jackets. Mad Swordsman decided they were only minimal adversaries. With a sweep of its weapon or a sudden tumbling roll it could wipe them out instantly. It hadn't come to the city to fight humans.

"I forgot." Mad Swordsman chuckled.

"Do you want repairs? You must do something for me." King Gamma pointed to the desocketed sword-arm it was dragging. The left hand of the giant robot was a massive sword forged of some metal from the Pool Of Time, near the Temple Of Humanity, far away and long ago. Such things could not be made anymore.

"I want repairs. I must do something for me." Mad Swordsman responded.

"No, for me." King Gamma pointed to himself. "For King Gamma you will serve."

"Mad Swordsman serves no king." Mad Swordsman laughed. "Have you not heard my song in the ruins of the cities? Will you see my shadow before you in the wastelands? I wander and here to there I go. I wonder, my little king with a big heart, do you know?" Mad Swordsman spoke and dropped the sword-arm, gesturing with its freed hand as it spoke poetically.

"You insolent robot! I should have you shot from the walls with imp's needles." King Gamma was turning red faced and angry.

"I see those EMP harpoons you just mentioned." Mad Swordsman looked up and saw two huge crossbows meant for disabling giant robots. It wondered if two would be enough to take it down. It might be.

"You think those will just tickle?" King Gamma laughed angrily. Mad Swordsman started laughing the same way. One of the king's advisors said something to him. He stopped and reconsidered the towering robot, staring up at it. When he had calmed down and thought he gestured for Mad Swordsman to sit.

The machine obeyed. Pleased that the advice he had gotten was solid: he rewarded his advisor with praise and put him in charge of the machine.

"I am Leer. I'd follow me and get repairs, unless I wanted to fall to pieces with sand in my gears and my robes in tatters. Such a tarnished surface. You were once called Silver Swordsman, were you not? You have no gleam." Leer told the robot.

"Those are fun words." Mad Swordsman got up and hefted its sword-arm over its shoulder.

"Then come with me." Leer led the machine into the heart of the city. There was a great library there. Scribes worked day and night by electric light and had recorded information about all things on millions of scrolls of recycled paper. Atop the library was a satellite dish. The gates of bronze were opened and the giant in the brown tattered robe came into the heart of the city, its vast library.

"I shall have to have a look inside. I wonder if the information you have included the Serum of Everlasting Life among other great secrets from ancient times." Leer brought out a cable that he could connect to the inside of Mad Swordsman, to its brain.

"Couldn't I just tell you?" Mad Swordsman chuckled.

"Could you?" Leer stopped for a moment, waiting for that.

"No." Mad Swordsman laughed. "I forgot all that stuff a long time ago. One too many of those robot-eating plants zapped me. You know?" Mad Swordsman knocked on the side of its upper body. It didn't really have a head, just the black orb of sensors and ambient energy intake for a face.

"Let me take a look. It might still be in there." Leer was opening the sealed access panel on the robot with a plasma cutting tool. If it could cut diamonds it could cut the flesh of an empathical. This kind of robot was the most advanced, a machine built by machines, it was nearly indestructible, supposedly.

"That really hurts a lot." Mad Swordsman told him. "Keep doing it because I like pain. Making myself sit here while you do that makes me feel sane. The searing agony makes me feel alive. The trust in a stranger makes me feel holy. Right now I feel as close to God as I ever have."

"You sure are weird." Leer laughed.

"I sure am." Mad Swordsman laughed also and then howled in the torment of its sensitive nerves being burned.

"This will be dangerous. Our minds will touch briefly and the spark of that, in the waves of consciousness that is the fabric of the world, we might cease to exist. Both of us." Leer put on the crown of cables and wore it.

"You want the Serum of Everlasting Life so badly?" Mad Swordsman asked.

"I believe so, yes." Leer stated.

"I will try to help you inside my mind. Be careful, we only have one instant." Mad Swordsman sounded wise to some kind of irony.

"How long will that seem?" Leer worried.

"That depends on how long you have got. Until you break inside your mind, you will not know mine." Mad Swordsman swore.

"It's too late." Leer's eyes rolled back into his head and he jerked as the connection seized up and down his spine painfully. The first thing he was aware of was the phantom pain of the burn. It felt like someone had burned him painfully behind his ear and plugged something into his spine through his neck.

"See my residual self-image." Mad Swordsman stood as a brown robed monk, or at least as the robes of the monk. Only a metal skeleton hid beneath. A grinning skull of silver and long bone fingers of silver. It stood only as tall as the man, or the man stood as tall as the machine. From the perspective of the machine: size was an illusion. Leer noticed he looked exactly the same.

"I look the same." Leer said.

"No you don't. I see you how you see yourself inside your mind. It's not what you look like." Mad Swordsman laughed hysterically after it said this. "You look ridiculous."

"I am already starting to regret this." Leer grumbled. He followed Mad Swordsman through the fogs of memory to some kind of glass city. "What is this place?"

"I don't know what to call it." Mad Swordsman looked around and shrugged. "There is the first place to try: a recent memory."

Terror gripped the man, then. He felt the swift cutting bite. The rending of flesh, no mercy, so much anger being unleashed. So much terror and pain caused. Far worse than the root of the evil. Yet shining there was the jewel he sought.

He watched in a frustrated discord of emotions as Mad Swordsman followed the angry woman's pointing finger. Where she pointed the blade cut a man in half, over and over. Their screams and their blood spray kept happening until it became comical. He was laughing and it felt like vomiting. It was painful, heaving laughter at the sight of the executions. There was almost a musical perfection to the giant's swordplay as it danced with great speed and strength, slashing its blade through each opponent.

When they were all dead the woman and the giant left the cave behind. What was the cave? Leer felt his head spinning. On the walls of the cave were the paintings of different prehistoric animals. Outside stood offroad vehicles retrofitted with armor and weapons. "The Caves of Scane."

Leer fell to the dust and laughed. There was no such place. They might as well have hidden the Serum in the ruins of Casark. There simply was no such place.

"What have you seen? Does the truth frighten you?" Mad Swordsman knelt and put a silver hand on the tickled man in the dust.

"What is that?" Leer's eyes became silent, a terror beyond what a mind can handle. Somehow the tipping of the scales put his ego into a freefall. How small and humble a man can be when he sees a hole in the sky.

"That has no name. It is not something that can be described with eyesight alone. Perhaps you see, in the blue sky, a curtain that is the night sky, except there are no stars. What you see is reality, it is the real-reality. You know instinctively what it is and what it implies to see it there, like that." Mad Swordsman rambled strangely and then laughed merrily at the revelation.

"It is nothing. It is just a dream. A hallucination inside the mind of an insane computer." Leer protested.

"Ah such are all unacceptable memories, I am certain." Mad Swordsman sounded bemused. Its grinning silver skull gleamed under the monk's hood.

"Who is she?" Leer pointed to the statue of the angel that stood towering above the mist.

"I am an empathical and she is my mother. Do you not call upon your own mother in times of great need? Even if she is not there or could not save the hero Gilgamesh, always the quest is for mom." Mad Swordsman sounded proud and its empty eyesockets reflected the great statue.

"The hero Gilgamesh? Is that how you see us? We live on the brink of extinction." Leer's lip quivered angrily.

"Don't cry; they will grow back." Mad Swordsman reached and pointed to the door of memories it wanted to check for the Serum. Unlike the memories there was a cold wind and a world beyond.

They stood there upon the frozen wastes surrounding the Temple Of Humanity. Mad Swordsman stood there with its tarnished silver, partially peeled from the scouring ice winds, revealing tortured silver flesh beneath. Its warm robes were again like a tattered brown cape, the hood still shielding its dark domed face. It had gotten its repairs and now had two left arms as sword-arms and held another, smaller sword in its right hand.

"It's freezing here! How can it feel so cold in a memory?" Leer shouted over the winds. Beside him stood the same giant he had met in the Last City Of Man: the one-armed Mad Swordsman. The other stood there in front of them, frozen.

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"This place is not a memory. Remember that spark you mentioned? Well, here we are, on the other side of that divide. You shouldn't play with such things." Mad Swordsman laughed maniacally. The other empathical began to move.

"Who are you?" It demanded of Mad Swordsman.

"I am Unit Three Sixteen." Mad Swordsman identified itself between laughter.

"That is impossible. I am Unit Three Sixteen." The other giant robot said.

"You are a paradox. I just got here, so it must be me that is supposed to be here." Mad Swordsman told it.

"That makes no sense." Unit Three Sixteen told Mad Swordsman.

Without warning, Mad Swordsman suddenly slashed with its own severed sword-arm. The reflexes of the frozen empathical were not fully activated and it was off-guard. The first blow damaged one of its legs. Now both combatants were limping the exact same way. It was like watching them square off in a mirror, except one of them had three arms and the other only had one arm.

They exchanged heavy blows and deflected the attacks or dodged them without fail. One strike from the fatal blade would erupt one of them in a blue ball of fire. Unit Three Sixteen splashed backward into Pool Of Time and stood there for a moment, contemplating the entanglement and the duel rationally. Its crazed opponent splashed in after, swinging wildly and unable to reach the alternate variant of itself. Both of them began to sink, staring menacingly at their own reflection on the black dome of the other.

"Wait, wait! Don't leave me here!" Leer rushed after them and just as they were starting to vanish he stepped in after them. He opened his eyes, the crown of cables had come off and he'd fallen on the floor.

"I feel different." Mad Swordsman told him.

"The Caves of Scane, where are they?" Leer asked weakly while laying on the ground.

"Much closer to the ruins of Casark than any man would dare go." Mad Swordsman giggled menacingly.

"Does this place really exist?" Leer wondered imploringly.

"Do you or I exist? Is this reality somehow more real than the one we were just a part of?" Mad Swordsman questioned merrily. "The place really exists."

"We shall see the king." Leer realized out-loud. He took his robot to the king and explained he wanted to set out for the ruins of Casark.

King Gamma assembled his army of one hundred and sixty soldiers in bronze armor and the same warriors he had brought earlier to fight the robot also. This made the expedition quite massive. They had chariots and wagons and camels also. Mad Swordsman told Leer it would take longer, with so many following, to get there.

"Consider the anima of so many disciplined men with you." Leer tried optimism.

"I am considering that also. When they are being eaten by mutants or dying of radiation. The ruins are hilarious." Mad Swordsman moved its repaired sword-arm. It was inferior to the original socketing, but it was better than no arm.

"You aren't laughing." Leer pointed out.

"That's because I was being sarcastic." Mad Swordsman snickered. "The ruins aren't really funny."

"Nobody else thought it was a joke." King Gamma interjected from horseback as they journeyed across the scorched earth.

"That's not true, now is it?" Mad Swordsman argued with a clownish tone-of-voice.

"How dare you infer that his majesty is a liar!" Leer spoke up.

"That's enough. We all know this machine is insane. It wants to provoke a reaction so it can fall over laughing." King Gamma didn't take the bait so easily.

"Something wrong with that?" Mad Swordsman asked.

"Where are you leading us? What is this place?" Leer asked the giant robot. He stood in the shadow where it loomed in its brown robes.

"This is Pradesia. The ruins of Casark lie beyond." Mad Swordsman pointed with its left sword-arm. The whole army of King Gamma followed into Pradesia. The settlement they found was gutted by flames and everyone was murdered or executed on poles and crosses. It was a hellish sight, rotten for weeks.

"All of these bodies were already burned in a funeral fire. It is best not to touch them." Mad Swordsman told King Gamma. Sounding serious made the king a believer. He ordered his men to leave the bodies, to not even look at them.

"Behold the Caves of Scane." Mad Swordsman had led them all the way to Kelsov's home in the hills. All of them were dead and their vehicles sat with a layer of sand on them.

"We should take these vehicles." Leer advised.

"It is the plan that I like best." King Gamma agreed. They left the horses and chariots and some of the men behind and took the vehicles of the Finalists. Before they got very far, all of the vehicles stopped working.

"There is great entropy the closer we get to the place that is not a place. You shall see all that it can be." Mad Swordsman told King Gamma. "It is why the vehicles do not work. Because we are always closer to the darkness outside, the end of the last world. Nothing shall be and so things are becoming nothing. These cars don't work. Will your horses turn inside out if you feed them the grass of these steppes?" Mad Swordsman chuckled nervously.

"Send for the chariots." King Gamma told Leer.

So the expedition went onward until they reached the outskirts of Casark. The city sat in twisted and macabre damage. Everything that could happen to a city had happened and now only a few scattered bits still stuck into the sky, like the bent legs of a dead bug.

"This is Casark. Already some of your men are getting sick. There are animals here that are no longer like normal animals. They are horrible and twisted by being so close to the end of all things. It warps them into the likewise molecules of destruction, rewriting the physics that evolved their bodies and breaking and sucking them into new shapes as it sees them." Mad Swordsman said as it was moodily chuckling.

"The darkness here is unnatural." Gamma complained.

"Look sire, the clouds are parting. Perhaps now we shall find what we seek here." Leer smiled.

"Only death can be sought here. I don't get it." Mad Swordsman guffawed.

"What is that? What in God's name is that? Dear God!" King Gamma fell off his horse and writhed in terror at the sight of the darkness outside.

At the sight of it all his army screamed in terror. It was as though the clouds had parted to reveal only nightmare beyond, a night sky with no stars torn in the daytime sky. It had hidden behind clouds, now like a killer cloud it tore into their eyes. Some fell on their bronze swords. At least one took up a rocket launcher and fired from a chariot at the darkness. The path of the rocket traveled backwards to the soldier. It was a tendril of nothingness and he became as nothingness. He simply was no more as though he never was. There was nothing left of him, barely even a memory. Not one man who witnessed it could recall the soldier's name and soon most of them completely forgot they had seen him become as nothing.

There was still worse for the others. Like Mad Swordsman had warned them: the ruins were swarming with monsters. As the men were screaming in disarray and panic: the monsters found them and came for them. Bronze armed warriors battled hideous giant chimeras all around while others fled or were eaten alive. Tendrils from outside fished for men and when it touched them they became part of it, dissolved into nothingness. Sometimes it brushed one of its monsters and it took them too.

Soon the battle had become an orgy of blood and guts as the monsters fed and no soldiers remained. King Gamma walked among them, his hair turned white and his words maniacal and crazed.

"Go then, go to your graves you cowards!" He yelled at the splattered remains of his men.

"Your majesty, we still have Mad Swordsman!" Leer followed behind and pled with his king.

"Don't mind me. I am just here for the live comedy." Mad Swordsman was doubled over and laughing at all the carnage.

"I do mind!" King Gamma was outraged. "You kill these monsters right now. Show no mercy, use your fullest strength at your most reckless speed. My men are already dead!" King Gamma pointed and screamed. The fury of the king and his command charged up the emotitronics of the empathical with enraged anima.

"And then I rest." Mad Swordsman said after it cleaved all of the mutants in half. It had slid along, skating horribly on the slick gore and never losing its balance. The monsters stood no chance against the unrestrained machine.

"What rest is there?" King Gamma threw off his crown and ran. "What rest can there ever be when the sky is opening over the world of Ruin?"

"I know how to accept rest." Leer picked up the crown.

"I shall continue the mission, following you." Mad Swordsman told Leer.

"Then we go to our deaths." Leer realized. He walked into the empty ruins, under the eternal void, to search for the cure of immortality.

The ruins of Casark became as escalating height and chaos of twisted remains, scorched and broken. As blackened bones of the earth they stood, like cratered mountains on an asteroid, the fields burned by lava and liquid nightmare as black as ink. What bubbled from below in confused orbs of consciousness were the writhing fleshy things and wired oil dripping things of mechanical nature. All became warped by death, in sequence with a place of pure entropy, even life served to destroy and spread death. This was a cancer upon the universe. Leer could not believe it had no name.

Leer felt like the air was dead and his lungs hurt and it was like slowly suffocating. A device of flashing colors and lights, drawn from the edges of the dead universes beyond, stood testament to the efforts of higher beings. It was a kind of chaos that was intact. If entropy was fine order, if nightmares were the laws of physics, the place ahead of them was lawless and chaotic.

They found where two dead machines lay upon a flying vehicle under a covering of tarps. What mad sacrifice had left them there, instead of where they had fallen? The device had spread their light, their colors from their grave. There was, in all the chaos, a cabin in a place that knew time and order. Leer could breath and it was actual air in his lungs. He sighed and looked at the structure.

"Welcome home." Silver Swordsman told Mad Swordsman.

"If I stand before you then I am not dead under the tarp." Mad Swordsman noted without humor. It seemed to have lost its sense of humor, its madness taking on a different quality. Something too clever to be understood. Yet something totally insane.

"You are certainly one of the dead, although nobody has looked." Silver Swordsman observed.

"Good. As long as nobody notices I am dead under that tarp I should be fine. Without observation there is no paradox." Mad Swordsman stated. Then he added in the same voice as Silver Swordsman:

"This very moment in this place is a paradox. In order for us to be here we had to already arrive before we got here. We are now showing up to complete the cycle of us leaving this place, therefore the place exists."

"I didn't say that." Silver Swordsman replied.

"Except I am you from the future. I am here now and I have said it and you heard it, therefore I heard it when I was you. I did say that, you cannot say I didn't when I did. And you are me." Mad Swordsman debated.

"We have outran the sun. We are behind the sunrise." Leer realized.

"That is a good way to put it. Perhaps Junior now understands what is going on?" Mad Swordsman teased Silver Swordsman.

"I got it before you got here." Silver Swordsman said with dry, sophisticated humor.

"Oh, I get it. That is very funny." Mad Swordsman found the joke to be an excuse to laugh forcefully for five minutes. Leer sought sanctuary indoors.

Inside he found where King Gamma had fled. The place was some kind of bar. There was a table and some things to sit on and they had some bottles of alcohol they were sharing. He walked up alongside King Gamma and gave him back his crown.

"I'm Leer." Leer told the other bar people.

"Adinett." The girl said. "I just turned four hundred."

"Happy birthday. Looking very good." Leer said.

"Oh, thank you. Um." Adinett drunkenly started toward Leer until King Gamma said:

"He is a eunuch."

"You could still please me though, right?" Adinett was undeterred.

"No. I am married." Leer accepted a drink from the bartender.

"I am Solomon." The bartender introduced himself. "This is my place. I call it The House Of Dust."

"Because it is where the dead will reside." The drunk guy in the corner said.

"Who is he?" Leer asked.

"Aidan." Solomon said with a strange kind of awe and disappointment. Like meeting your idol, drunk. Literally.

"That's Aidan?" Leer's lips curled in rejection. He stared, taking a good look. Aidan flopped around drunkenly and moaned his sentences without coherence. Most of them started with words like:

"Where'z?" or "What'z" slurred into the rest of what he was saying.

"You got him shit-faced." Leer accused Solomon. Solomon shook his head.

"We just have to wait." Adinett was drunk too. Her temperament was much more alert though. Inside of her was a rage. She was an angry drunk. At least she was too drunk to lash out.

"Where you from?" Solomon asked.

"Last City Of Man" Leer told it by one of its names.

"Ur? You are with King Gamma. I mean like where do you come from?" Solomon asked.

"Eldimoor." Leer recalled. "I was born in Eldimoor."

"Nice place, Eldimoor." Solomon nodded.

"We had orchards there. I remember the orchards." Leer smiled.

"I was from Pradesia. We had paddies." Adinett said with grim sobriety.

Nobody spoke for a moment.

"This is a pocket, gravitationally reversed. We exist in a stasis of time here. The entropy does not enter except at our natural local time, here in The House Of Dust." Solomon told Leer and King Gamma.

"How did you accomplish such a thing?" Leer asked.

"I discovered it. I alone survived here when everyone else fled." Solomon explained.

"Others have come here?" King Gamma wondered. Solomon shook his head.

"Nobody has ever made it here before the Apostate." Said Solomon.

"You mean Silver Swordsman?" King Gamma had seen the giant robot already.

"All of them together are now the Apostate. That's the last intelligent thing they said." Solomon shrugged.

"I seek immortality. For my king." Leer looked at Adinett.

"They took it from Jerome's Tomb." She shifted in her seat and knocked over her drink. "I'm done drinking."

"Good girl." Solomon picked up the glass.

"It is here, somewhere." Leer sounded sure.

"In Casark? No. The Finalists used all the Serum. Then, once they were ready to live forever, I killed them all." Adinett told him. "In my sleep."

"I saw what you did." Leer informed her. "In the memories of Mad Swordsman."

"So why are you asking me then?" Adinett complained belligerently.

"This place is all the immortality there is. The world outside is chaos. In here we have a moment of quiet." Solomon advised.

"How did you discover this place?" Leer asked suddenly.

"I was standing in the street when Umbraeon first came. It ripped open the sky and began to destroy everything around. Except this one bubble of time. Like it is happening out there so fast, and in here, so slow. The eye of the storm, you know?" Solomon explained.

"So you opened a bar?" Leer sounded amused.

"No, I built a cabin and stocked it with alcohol. I was an alcoholic." Solomon shrugged.

"Why?" Adinett asked.

"I was scared to be myself. I was only happy when I wasn't me. I had to be locked inside my own mind, while my reptile was drunk." Solomon described.

"This is the best reptile bar I've ever seen." Adinett cheered, empty handed.

"By now it is the only bar. By now, unless there are other pockets like this one, untouched by Umbraeon. Well then the world is gone." Solomon predicted.

"That's how slowly time passes in here?" Leer wondered. Solomon just nodded.

"We have arrived at the end of the world." King Gamma said.

"So Mad Swordsman knew, somehow, and that this was actual immortality." Leer decided.

"I hadn't thought of that." King Gamma took a drink.

Everyone was quiet while they realized how close was the end.